Progress of EasySocial 2.0

Mark Thursday, 28 July 2016 EasySocial

There has been many questions and inquiries about EasySocial 2.0 and today I would like to spare some time to post some updates about it. Just in case some of you aren't aware of this, we are still in the midst of developing EasySocial 2.0 and EasySocial 2.0 will be one of our biggest updates for EasySocial.

Bringing Sexy Back

EasySocial now comes with a brand spanking new look! With all the modern web design these days which inspired us to have a clean and minimalist concept. When I mean brand new UI, I mean literally everything! We have redesigned almost 99% of the UI on EasySocial including every single stream objects.

We also have a style guide in place to ensure that the look and feel throughout EasySocial is standardized.

Pages Support

One of the most anticipated feature of EasySocial 2.0, is the Pages functionality. This is pretty identical to a profile page, a Page would allow users to create their Business Pages, Club Pages or any other nodes within a Social Network.

Pages would also incorporate custom fields and access control similar to what you have already seen on Groups and Events.

Twitter Authentication

A single Sign On is a pretty useful tool and it helps with conversion rates. We noticed that with EasySocial, there are at least 50% more sign up rates with Facebook. We are now adding Twitter into the single sign on stack to increase sign up rates. I am looking forward to see your sites convert more sign ups with this pretty nifty tool!

Reduced Javascript Footprints

We have also reduced the number of HTTP requests made to render javascript (from 6 requests to only just 2) on the site and reduced the size of the scripts file. By doing this, your site would load less resources and your hosting provider would definitely love this update. Apart from this, images are now using css sprites to reduce the number of requests made on the site as well.

P/S: We are still fine tuning this and I am personally hoping that we could exclude jQuery from our source file and to rely jQuery from Joomla instead.

Massive Code Refactoring

One of the priority on this release is to ensure that the software can be easily maintained throughout the development cycle. By refactoring on our existing codes, it reduces bottlenecks and at the same time increased productivity as it is now more flexible and extensible. We anticipated EasySocial 2.0 to be almost 4x faster than EasySocial 1.4 :)

Brand New Conversations

Conversations in EasySocial 2.0 just got better. After improving the conversations on EasyDiscuss, it seems to gained some popularity. The new layout will definitely be more engaging and interactive among users on your Social Network site.

Advance Searching

We had Advanced Search for users prior to EasySocial 2.0 but we have now also added Advanced Search for Groups, Events and Pages in EasySocial. This would allow users on the site to quickly locate and search for their favorite groups, events and pages.

Moderation Workflow

Prior to EasySocial 2.0, moderation is the real a pain in the a**. Users who have already submitted their groups or events would not be able to find these items once the admin rejects their requests to publish these items. In EasySocial 2.0, users would be able to find all items that are rejected right from the respective pages so that they could fix their errors and request for submission again.

More Administration Enhancements

With EasySocial 2.0, we have also added the ability for site administrator's to be able to modify themes and email files from the back-end. Gone are the days where you have to manually upload files to ftp on your server to modify these files. Application management would be a breeze on EasySocial 2.0 as we will be enhancing the Apps Directory in the extension itself. This would allow you to update / purchase / install apps without having to manually access the Apps Directory :)

As always, these are just some of the major updates that I am outlining here but there are over 450 other improvements that is done on EasySocial 2.0 which I can't list them right now :)

Some comments:
- If its possible please include photos and videos to the Advanced Search page.
- There is no mention of the Membership System in the blog, has this been dropped from 2.0?

Otherwise everything seems to be coming together really well.

Are App Developers already being involved with development so that they can make their applications compatible with ES 2.0? Many of us have integration's from one to many other extensions and need to maintain those connections before making a major upgrade. If its possible to get the app developers a refactoring example this would help to expedite that process.

Thanks James! Advanced search on photos and videos is pretty tricky since it doesn't have "custom fields" to begin with. Let's see what we can implement in the shortest time

As for the paid membership / subscription, we wanted more time and this will probably come in with 2.1. We did actually work almost 70% of it but it's the same scenario where we aren't confident enough to push this out. This is actually pretty risky if it breaks especially when it deals with "monies".

We will try to get as many 3rd party template / extension / app makers to stick to EasySocial 2.0's standard before we push the stable release out.

Mark, PLEASE can you implement optional 'Custom Fields' on Photos and Videos and bring them inline with the other ES elements? This will allow me and others who use ES as a Photo / Gallery centric social platform to really make sites work. I am more than happy to pay the additional development costs. Dave

Hi Mark, thanks for the rapid response. I did sort of anticipate this response as I already know your view on Photo categories in both ES and from the Jomsocial days . I don't get it really as in my (humble) opinion there is no logic in having categories for Videos, Events, Groups (everything else) and not for Photo's / Albums - Videos and Photos are two different types of media - one type is static and the other moves ? I paid a developer to code this into Jomsocial many years ago and it worked perfectly but of course broke on every new code release

Either way, if you ever change your stance on this as an 'optional' functionality then I am happy to fund (within reason ) . Unfortunately my main site is not video focussed.

Not ideal. Template makers do add their own H1 tags and most sites would end up with double H1 tags which hurts even more.

Allow me to not agree with that, I think Easysocial has to really on his own functions and not way template clubs to make easysocial overrides to fix the problem, more then that, is more easy to fix an issue on a template, rather then hacking easysocial core and lose fix with each update ( there are people who use own custom template and there's no extra <h1> )

Why not a conversation search? This way you could look up based on text as well (username and searching text). For example you could look up "Problem with Photos" which would bring up the conversation where this was mentioned followed by injecting a name anchor that would bring you to the id of that message. Facebook has a search, but is not as good as what I'm proposing. Being able to find conversations would help a lot!

As for h1 vs h2. Accidentally having 2 h1's is more ideal than having none.

With the advent of HTML5 the answer to this question has significantly changed in both SEO and technical regards. It's now not only possible to have multiple h1 level headings per webpage that will make sense to search engines

The rest looks awesome, as always... but we have been holding the license and it expires in 2 months, We're using something else because there is no integrated payment solution and the ones we can buy external are not great.

The irony of the universe. You'll release something just as we subscription expire again, and we'll have to buy it again, just to see if it works for us. This is feeling eerily familiar. LOL

Makes me sad to see subscriptions were not as important as layout changes.

Mark has stated that there are over 450 other improvements that is done on EasySocial 2.0 which I can't list them right now, so before jumping to conclusions that certain features most wanted are not going to be included, let's wait for Mark to respond. I am sure he will roll out more innovative features not included in this post in the near future.

I look forward to further information and want to thank Mark and the rest of the StackIdeas Team for their dedication to bring us the best features in EasySocial 2 update. It look s exciting.

Thanks for your input on this, very much appreciated. To be honest, we don't feel comfortable releasing the paid membership yet at this point of time. As stated in one of my comments above, it deals with "monies" and it's going to be messy if it wasn't done right. We will definitely try to push this on 2.1

As for the subscriptions, to be frank with you, the mindset needs to be changed Having a valid subscription is not only just about getting updates. It's about supporting the project and keeping your software up to date. If everyone just waits for a new release before renewing, believe me, this project will not go anywhere.

Having said that, I know the price isn't leaning towards the cheap pricing point but we are coming up with new subscription bundles that would help you save money

Please reconsider how Pages work with lockdown enabled. I think making Pages available to the public while on lockdown mode (just like Facebook) would not create much work since it only validates one setting (I guess).

I've been waiting for this feature since v1.0 and our community can definitely take advantage of this instead of creating separate Article pages for each and has to update content as the community group create new events. With Pages they can organically update their page without me getting involved.

I know you guys are busy in development, all I'm asking is to rethink on Pages ACL please if you and your team think it creates a lot of work then I guess I'll understand and hope for it in the future.

Pretty cool and nice work !!
What a good news to hear the pages comes !!

For advance search, a cool feature could be the ability to exclude (from backend) some categories for pages/groups/events like for private ones.
And also exclude profile type to be searched (from front end) and filtered on the stream. Idea is to have a profile type that can be more "private". In sites that have pro and clients profiles, clients can find pro and engage communication but not reverse (or not in a easy way).
XIUS and JSPT from readybytes are a good exemple on the idea.
They give a great flexibility on profiles and how they can be searched.

Just an other thought, could be pretty cool too that the feature "follow" could be ported for groups/pages.
This way a user can be member of it after validation and being featured in, and other users can only follow the group/page to see the update from it.

Best regards, and impatient to see all these new features to come with 2.0.
When is an approximation date for this released ?

We looked into that. Problem is, it's not fully compatible with our servers and if we go with an outside vendor for something so core; every upgrade is a potential nightmare. Single vendor, core software - which for us, includes subscriptions/membership.

It's funny how many people have commented - seriously need to say, I really am not attacking Mark or anyone. I've bought their products multiple times now and have never been able to actually launch a site with them. I think it's ok to voice disappointment over what I thought was a pretty normal thing to expect from a software package like this.

I get where you are coming from and totally understand you here. Paid subscriptions is something that we will not take lightly and it is definitely on the pipeline. Just that we don't feel it is good enough for 2.0 and we wouldn't want to roll this out just yet.

If you are customizing the theme files, I would suggest that you hold back and wait for 2.0. This will be a major upgrade and unfortunately it has to be in 2.0 or we will stuck with non standardized designs throughout EasySocial.

Since the birth of EasySocial, we have been riding on the same DOM structure for over 4 years and we believe that it's time to keep up with technology. Not really a fancy decision but we need to step out of the box

I've this idea for a really long time, yeah I totally agree. I would also have it be able to display pending items as well as user reports. An admin inbox would also be awesome so that all administrators can handle individual messages, create accountability, and make it a lot more likely for the normal user to get a good response. If we had both front end admin notifications and an admin inbox I would combine the display into a single module for the sake of simplicity. Kinda like the notifications module that shows messages, friend requests, and notifications.

Exciting - you and your team are taking EasySocial to the next level and we are at GoGreen Portals Group pleased to be on-board.

App developments and third party integrations are important for us and I am sure other people here at the Stack Ideas community will you in EasySocial 2.0 make it easier to develop Apps and integrations for EasySocial.

Thank you Finn and yes you are absolutely right. The app area needs a lot of rework and we are also tapping into plugins on Joomla. Most triggers that are available on EasySocial app would also be exposed to Joomla plugins as well.

Hi Mark,
I welcome this new feature Mark awesome! I developed a user plugin before hooking on Joomla's after user update but the event is not exposed to EasySocial. I think your answer to me is I have to use ES event trigger for that instead. Anyways, if ES events are exposed to Joomla plugins as well then development would be easier

We strongly recommend users to hook into EasySocial's application event stream as it would be ideal and takes up less resources compared to the plugin hooks but it seems like it wouldn't do much harm apart from taking a little more resources (most of the time it would be during a CRUD operation, so I guess it would be fine) if they are exposed to the Joomla plugins too.

No matter the number of features that have been developed or how the software is delivered to the end-user, a comprehensive software monetizing strategy is paramount to a developing and maintaining a sustainable community.

Subscriptions must be the highest priority in ES 2.1, and it is suggested an iterative approach be taken in the development of 2.1 with a limit being placed on nice to have features but not cirtical features such as paid subscriptions.

Monetizing software solutions hinges on four key factors. - Stack Ideas has always shown it can 1) very effectively package, 2) control, 3) manage, and 4) track their extension offerings, and ES 2.0 is a substantial upgrade, but not all features wanted could be added. Mark has stated the reason for paid subscriptions being pushed to 2.1 and I trust his better judgment. By focusing on adding less features in each iterative version of 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 will result in more timely updates, and this will help administrators to deliver their social network to end-users and pay for it.

I would rather have 2.1 be totally focused on paid subscriptions than adding new features. Less is more.

I would rather have 2.1 be totally focused on paid subscriptions than adding new features. Less is more.

You rocked man! Totaly agree. Stackideas had give to us a such great software, our communities offer excellent UI services. It is time for some gas to the engine. Subscriptions will help us and the Project also.

Does discussions support posting photos and multiple photos inline in the posts so we can use it for photography forums or other types of photo based discussions? It would seem you could keep track of the image URL after its uploaded and allow an insert feature that simple displays the photo via its URL.

As always guys great work and thank you for updating us on the progress with 2.0, it really does look great and some nice additions mentioned also like pages. My questions here are essentially around Events and hopefully I can share some thoughts here and get some feedback form yourselves and the community.

- Currently a person who owns an event (I will call them manager/owner/moderator/ of an event) can write announcements and see the guest list and a few other things like edit dates and times however they do not really get too much control over managing the full life cycle of an event and I was hoping for this to change maybe in some of the next releases. For example I run a business network and basically their is a third party moderator/manager/owner of specific events. I might have 4 or 5 events/conferences per month and each would have a different moderator and sometimes a moderator would be managing 2 events for example. What that moderator must have is the ability to 1.) invite the email mailing list they have in bulk as well as their easysocial friends which I know is there of course 2.) they must be able to see stats of the events like how many people saw it a bit like the great stats you now get with Easyblog. 3.) the admin/moderator/manager of the event must be able to export all the attendees of an event to spreadsheet for naming purposes at the event and to make sure the people who registered are ticked off and accounted for (name, email, address, phone etc). I guess my point is it would be great if the manager of an event had a dashboard to manage their events fully, a bit like the dashboard for easyblog with the features outlined. I do understand not eveeryone would like their event owners to be able to export their guests name and email but to be honest anyone running a professional conference or large scale events must have this feature as its the single most important thing you would need at the time of the event. Right now I am manually supplying all this to moderators and its alot of work of course.

Great job on subscriptions in a possible V2.1, that will be powerful for sure, just hope Stripe is in there Also thinking of the club pages for club type networks would it be possible for pages to setup subscriptions of their own that they can manage for their club page through the network. Ultimately I think that is the key to a network offering that level of granularity as apposed to it being more a traditional cms environment.

Thank you! Do you have an estimated time on when it will come out? Also Not sure if I'm doing enough theme customization, just want to have that clear.

I do the config work withing easy social and I may need to tweak some css here and there, would that be enough customization to hold off on or are you referring more to editing php and moving things around?

1- Speed (You said 2.0 will be 4x faster then 1.x, i cant wait
2- ES Sidebars or "Toggle Sidebar" for mobile devices.

People use internet mostly (%70-80) on mobile devices. Its really hard to find or figure out, especially for users, when they want to use "settings" by using Sidebar Toggle button, like profil, notification, privacy, group, event and the same thing for stream "filters" and other thing need to toggle sidebar. I was wondering how other joomla extentions deal with this and i saw that your biggest competitor has found a great solution for this like dropdown menus, ajax buttons and icons on "content area", everything is on "Content" area, not on extra sidebar ( With joomla sidebars its getting more complicated) It doesnt matter how many filter items there are, it looks and works perfectly, its really easy to use. I strongly recommend this change on 2.0, then ES will be %100 easy to use (This is so important) both on destktop and mobile devices.

Thanks for the input on this. I don't think it is ideal to strip the sidebar altogether as this is a cleaner approach versus having tabs. Having said that, having a different approach on mobile is something that we are going to try

This looks great. One request; it would be helpful to have an email digest option for notifications to avoid lots of emails being sent that might simply be ignored on account of them becoming overwhelming. EasyDiscuss has this facility now. It would be even better if the digest could be integrated when using multiple StackIdeas components i.e. EasySocial, EasyDiscuss and EasyBlog.

Guest - DP

about 4 months ago

@gokhan Hi mate i agree with you. I have been waiting for easysocial 2.0 for 4 months to launch my community site
Hi @mark me also find mobile demo of easysocial a bit complicated for users especially toggle sidebar
last week while searching for easysocial themes i stumbled upon joomforest theme sirenatheme they use very innovative toolbar for mobile users. it would be great if easysocial 2.0 also include such kind of toolbar for ease of mobile users
here is demo of toolbar

I agree subscriptions is a must these days, we are keeping on paying for hosting, support and even stackideas without any monetization for ourselves.
Its high time that some money also comes into our pockets and not only in Marks pocket

I agree a fully baked solution would be better, we have waited for long for this, so a further wait for a few months does not hurt that much.
In this time i'll order myself a bigger safe, as my pockets are small

Secondly mark, its nice to know that Twitter authentication would be now native, can i put a small request? please also include google authentication, this will complete the authentication package.
As almost 90% of people have gmail accounts, and with Facebook, Twitter & Google we can authenticate almost 99% of users.

Twitter is just an experiment that we are trying with. The social sign on is just a part of EasySocial 2.0. There will be a separate app which would extend this functionality. If this idea and concept works, you'll see more social sign on being added in the near future.

Guest - Rosy

about 4 months ago

Hi Mark ES 2.0 Looks GREAT Happy to become the part of stackideas family once ES 2.0 will launch
I have already drawn your kind attention toward one shortcoming of ES feed filter hashtag autosuggestion function and i also created the voice for this feature got some upvotes but unfortunately my voice was removed from voice page

It need only few lines of code to implement this feature on feed filter page. But it would be very helpful for me because my community project will be too much depend on this autosuggest hashtags filters. Please also try to add this feature in ES 2.0

Firstly, we value all feedback from our customers and what you have posted here makes perfect sense but the only problem is you don't own a subscription

I am not too sure how did you get the copy of EasySocial but this is where things gets messy. We need people who are actively supporting the project because without your support and all the warez that is going around, we won't be able to sustain to support the project. It's your call

I would suggest that you first get a subscription for yourself and utilize the voices area to submit your feature request.

Guest - Rosy

Guest - Rosy

about 4 months ago

Hi mark Thanks for Reply
I don't have any copy of easysocial. To illustrate my point i used demo site of easysocial http://easysocial.stackideas.com/
Then took screenshots, I always purchase the products from developers directly to support their hard work Throughout my entire life i never used any warez site

Oh yes, before I forget, one of the most anticipated feature which I forgot to mention in my post. With EasySocial 2.0, applications has it's own ACL now. You can now choose to enable / disable apps for different:

Really looking forward to ES 2.0, Mark. Thanks so much for including my voices idea for Twitter registrations. That will be a great help. Speed improvements running on the new PHP7 are going to be a huge help too. Also love the multi-column events, groups and pages listing views and new apps ACL!

Guest - BookFace

about 4 months ago

In ES 1.x, when a user uploads a pic, the file name of the pic is displayed everytime any person views that pic. for instance if the file name is IMG00001.JPG, that file name will be shows to anyone who browses the photo. I hope this file name will be completely hidden in ES 2.0 as is the norm with other social networks. I believe no one really needs to know the original file name.

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